From what I understand, the MacArthur foundation was one of the main funders of nuclear security research, including at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, but they massively reduced their funding of nuclear projects and no large funder has replaced them. https://www.macfound.org/grantee/carnegie-endowment-for-international-peace-2457/
(I’ve edited this comment, I got confused between the MacArthur foundation and the various Carnegie philanthropic efforts.)
Thanks, Abby. I knew MacArthur had left the space, but not that Carnegie Endowment had recently decreased funding. In any case, I feel like discussions about nuclear risk funding often implicitly assume that a large relative decrease in philanthropic funding means a large increase in marginal cost-effectiveness, but this is unclear to me given it is only a small fraction of total funding. According to Founders Pledge’s report on nuclear risk, “total philanthropic nuclear security funding stood at about $47 million per year [“between 2014 and 2020″]”. So a 100 % reduction in philantropic funding would only be a 1.16 % (= 0.047/4.04) relative reduction in total funding, assuming this is 4.04 G$, which I got from the mean of a lognormal distribution with 5th and 95th percentile equal to 1 and 10 G$, corresponding to the lower and upper bound guessed in 80,000 Hours’ profile on nuclear war.
From what I understand, the MacArthur foundation was one of the main funders of nuclear security research, including at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, but they massively reduced their funding of nuclear projects and no large funder has replaced them. https://www.macfound.org/grantee/carnegie-endowment-for-international-peace-2457/
(I’ve edited this comment, I got confused between the MacArthur foundation and the various Carnegie philanthropic efforts.)
Thanks, Abby. I knew MacArthur had left the space, but not that Carnegie Endowment had recently decreased funding. In any case, I feel like discussions about nuclear risk funding often implicitly assume that a large relative decrease in philanthropic funding means a large increase in marginal cost-effectiveness, but this is unclear to me given it is only a small fraction of total funding. According to Founders Pledge’s report on nuclear risk, “total philanthropic nuclear security funding stood at about $47 million per year [“between 2014 and 2020″]”. So a 100 % reduction in philantropic funding would only be a 1.16 % (= 0.047/4.04) relative reduction in total funding, assuming this is 4.04 G$, which I got from the mean of a lognormal distribution with 5th and 95th percentile equal to 1 and 10 G$, corresponding to the lower and upper bound guessed in 80,000 Hours’ profile on nuclear war.
Just to clarify:
MacArthur Foundation has left the field with a big funding shortfall
Carnegie Corporation is a funder that continues to support some nuclear security work
Carnegie Endowment is a think tank with a nuclear security program
Carnegie Foundation is an education nonprofit unrelated to nuclear security
Thanks for the clarification, too many Carnegies!
Thanks! and agreed: https://www.carnegie.org/about/our-history/other-carnegie-organizations/